He shaped the intellectual landscape of the Federal Republic for decades. The writer, essayist and great intellectual has now died at the age of 93.
The writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger has died. The publishers Suhrkamp and Hanser announced this on Friday. Along with Alexander Kluge and Jürgen Habermas, Enzensberger was one of the most influential intellectuals in the early Federal Republic and shaped intellectual life in the country for decades.
He leaves behind an extensive, widely ramified work. In 1957, at the age of 28, he made his debut with the book of poems “Defence of the Wolves”. The book earned him the reputation of an “angry young man”, but even then his use of language was cool and modern, the opposite of the language of Martin Heidegger, whom Enzensberger had heard as a student in Freiburg. When the volume of essays “Details” was published in 1962, Enzensberger did not analyze Proust and Joyce in it, but the Neckermann catalogue. At the time, he was interested in consumer and media society. In his dissertation on Clemens Brentano in 1955, he portrayed the romantic as an author whose strength grew from the virtuosic treatment of language, less from dreams and soul.
Enzensberger became a central figure in Gruppe 47, and at the age of 33 he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1963. He wrote regularly for FAZ and mirror, published fiction, essays and built a “poetry machine”, which is now in the Marbach Literature Archive. Enzensberger worked as an editor, publisher and author well into old age. He died on November 24, 2022 and was 93 years old.